Brigitte Macron versus a far right fantasist

Owens’ declaration to her millions of YouTube followers of an escalation in her online war with the Macrons came after the French president and his wife served her with a massive defamation suit, filed in Delaware, USA. The couple demanded unspecified damages in a 218-page filing, for “causing pain to us and our families” through what they call a “global campaign of humiliation” in which Owens has repeatedly spread the claim that Madame Macron is a biological man.

“Every time the Macrons leave their home, they do so knowing that countless people have heard, and many believe, these vile fabrications,” the suit states. 

It also outlines, for the first time, the Macrons’ version of their early relationship, which began after their first meeting when he was 15 and she was his 39 year-old teacher. “At all times, the teacher-student relationship between Mrs Macron and President Macron remained within the bounds of the law,” the filing notes, pointing out that it was Brigitte Macron herself who “encouraged him to leave (for school in Paris) and was confident he would fall in love with a peer. Yet, before his departure, he told her, ‘Whatever you do, I will marry you’.”

Owens’ response? That the “perverted and disgusting” Macrons had committed a colossal “PR strategy mistake” by trying to stop her talking about “Macron’s wife’s penis”. Oh, and how dare a sitting First Lady and president of a foreign country file a lawsuit against “a journalist of another country.” (Many US journalists would shudder to see professional Francophone Owens include herself among their number.)

She continued: “If you need any more evidence that Brigitte Macron is definitely a man, it is just what is happening right now. The idea that you would file this lawsuit is all of the proof that you need.”

The case of Owens’ battle with the Macrons, though, goes far beyond questions of birth sex. For more than a year, Owens has been recycling a conspiracy theory that originated within the French antisemitic far right. Its main spreaders — including Russian-asylum-seeking ‘journalist’ Natacha Rey and her clairvoyant pal Amandine Roy, as well as the Italy-exiled extremist publisher Xavier Poussard — are still facing legal jeopardy in France.

The theory targets Macron’s wife, her brother, and — through them — the president himself, with accusations of lying, paedophilia, rape, and incest.

Now, instead of limiting their legal fight to fringe French figures, the Macrons have opened a new front in the United States targeting Owens “outlandish, defamatory and far-fetched fictions” – including that the couple were related by blood and that Macron himself was the result of a CIA experiment or government mind control programme. It is a bold decision, confronting not only Candace Owens, but the American conspiracy economy that platforms and rewards her.

Their strategy makes sense given the calculated globalisation of this intimidation campaign. The onslaught only crossed the Atlantic after French far right crank Poussard and a similarly dark-minded conspiracy theorist, Aurelien Poirson-Atlan, actively sought out MAGA podcasters to Americanise their French hoax — culminating in a lurid and putrid collaboration with Owens that culminated in this year’s viral Becoming Brigitte video series on her video programme.

According to the Macrons’ lawsuit, Owens “disregarded all credible evidence disproving her claim” and rather than respond to their attempts to set the record straight, “Owens mocked them and used them as additional fodder for her frenzied fan base”.

Speaking through their US lawyer, the Macrons added: “Because Ms. Owens systematically reaffirmed these falsehoods in response to each of our attorneys’ repeated requests for a retraction, we ultimately concluded that referring the matter to a court of law was the only remaining avenue for remedy.”

Rudy Reichstadt, director of Conspiracy Watch, a France-based global platform that has been tracking and analysing the conspiracy theory sphere and its key actors for more than 16 years, says the Macrons’ lawsuit is “a reminder that the law applies to everyone, regardless of borders, and that the leader of a democracy has the same right as any citizen to protect himself and his family from personal defamation.”

He says the Brigitte Macron affair is a case of  “smoke without fire” – a pure delusion invented and amplified on social media, which has taken on the appearance of truth, complete with real and fake photos allegedly depicting the French First Lady with male genitalia

“Candace Owens is complicit in a vile campaign of slander and cyberharassment without having conducted even the most basic journalistic investigation,” Reichstadt says. “She’s an extraordinarily toxic figure in today’s disinformation landscape, spreading antisemitic and homophobic narratives and monetising the results.”

For Reichstadt, this legal step marks a necessary evolution beyond traditional fact-checking. “Debunking is no longer enough. The actors behind these disinformation campaigns must be held personally accountable.” He also urges platforms to delist the offending content and calls on the media to resist the lure of clickbait conspiracy.

Owens, who touts herself as “Christ-centered”, constantly raves about being the mother of four and a wife – of  British aristocrat George Farmer (ex-owner of the banned alt-right platform Parler). She flogs “pre-born ultrasounds” and Time Man of the Year’s t-shirts featuring Brigitte Macron’s face on her platforms.

An admirer and promoter of the alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate, she is sometimes considered too extreme even for a slice of the Trumper galaxy. But her bile-spitting conspiratorial rants about Brigitte Macron having been born male — and in fact being her brother Jean-Michel Trogneux — before transitioning around age 30, false claims bandied about in the sewers of the online world since at least 2021, have now gone fully global. 

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Among the MAGA faithful, Owens is not alone in sharing this vast, far right, and very Russophile conspiracy theory. Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Joe Rogan have all endorsed her claims. From Infowars’ Alex Jones to the.once disgraced then pardoned General Michael Flynn, the global conspiracy ecosystem is following Owens’ lead. 

Russian state media and the Kremlin’s foreign ministry have actively promoted the Brigitte Macron lie as part of their deliberate cyber-attacks on France and the French state, alongside other longstanding disinformation about Macron’s sex life, and efforts to paint him as a gay pedophile married to a child abuser who is not a woman at all.

The engineered attacks by Russian cyber-agents, including an AI-doctored video showing the real face of a former student of Brigitte Macron overlaid with a fake voice claiming she sexually abused him, are highlighted in several reports by the Viginum security agency. 

A Putin toady who backed Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Owens has openly stated she wants Moscow to win and has called Volodymyr Zelensky a “homosexual actor.” A serial promoter of the antisemitic “Great Replacement” theory, she has repeatedly defended Hitler who “just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK, fine”. Owens believes the Holocaust is “increasingly unprovable” and that “questioning the number 6 million should not be illegal in any free society.” 

Owens platforms professional Holocaust deniers and has praised Ye (aka Kanye West) after his outbursts lauding Hitler. A Black detractor of Black Lives Matter and formerly a Trump devotee, she can boast millions of followers and billions of views on her virulent Becoming Brigitte series.

The idea that Macron was “born male” and switched legal identities with a brother who “never existed” is now gospel for a segment of the conspiracist right that believes powerful women are secretly male. Owens has compared Brigitte Macron to Mrs Doubtfire and called her a “pervert” for falling in love with a 15-year-old. “Why does it feel like perverted individuals are running the entire globe?” she asked, dead serious.

Becoming Brigitte debuted in early 2025. Its slick videos, tailored for the TikTok and YouTube ecosystem, racked up billions of views across both Francophone and Anglophone platforms and propelled the Brigitte Macron affair into a top three conspiracy theory of 2025.

From there, the pipeline took over: Carlson, Rogan, Jones. “She’s right,” Carlson told his viewers. Jones linked Brigitte Macron to Jeffrey Epstein. Joe Rogan speculated it was “another Michelle Obama situation.” The lie became a meme. Then a movement.

Disgraced general and QAnon darling Flynn, who illegally shared state secrets with the Russians before being pardoned by Trump, also added his voice: “So weird,” he posted. “You’d think Macron and his ??? would just show the proof.” The innuendo was tailor-made for his base — a conspiracy-addled movement that sees trans people as avatars of satanic elites.

Owens’ glee was at full volume after a Paris appeals court earlier this month overturned a 2024 defamation conviction against two French women who had started the false rumor about Brigitte Macron’s gender in an interminable four-hour plus long YouTube video in 2021.

“It’s a dude! We won! We won!” Owens squealed, misrepresenting the ruling as validation of her absurd and vicious claims.

The court did no such thing. It overturned the conviction on procedural grounds – which the Macrons are appealing – citing the incoherence of the convicted defamers, and ambiguity around whether calling someone transgender was, in itself, defamatory. 

But that didn’t matter. In the MAGA–QAnon echo chamber, the lie was already rebranded as La Vérité. “The court has broken a taboo,” declared Kremlin-friendly influencer Mike Borowski. Owens, who had already declared she would “stake her career” on the claim that Brigitte Macron is a man, claimed total vindication.

This is the pattern now: powerful women must be exposed as secretly male, perverted, or both. Michelle Obama, former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, Kamala Harris, Serena Williams — have all been targeted. But the Brigitte Macron lie has traveled further, faster, and with more virulent misogyny, transgender and gay hate – and ageism – than any of them.

It is algorithmically adapted, propelled by Kremlin propaganda and rewarded by the clicks-and-merch machine of the extreme right podcaster internet, always eager to attack Europe and liberal democracies. Now the French first couple are trying to stand up to the globalised lie. Good for them.